Google, Sun Headed for Showdown Over Android

narramissic writes "There may be trouble brewing between Google and Sun. Google has written its own virtual machine for Android, 'most likely as a way to get around licensing issues with Sun.' If Google used any of Sun's intellectual property to build Dalvik, Sun could sue Google for patent infringement. But here's where it gets interesting - Sun is a vocal advocate for open source and it would 'hardly appease the open source community to sue Google over an open source software stack.'"

nothing to see here

[doktorjayd]

FTA:

While Sun declined to comment directly for this story, it pointed to some public statements from company executives. Jonathan Schwartz, president and CEO of Sun, wrote a blog post congratulating Google on the day of Android's launch. Notably, he refers to Android as a "Java/Linux" platform

where is the trouble? the article is pure beat-up.

the reason for dalvik is entirely technical. check out the youtube presentations, it makes it pretty clear that you develop in pretty much pure java, but the runtime needed a little more than the standard jme could provide.

move on..

FUD

[mritunjai]

Sun and Google are good partners, and I don't see them getting into legal minefield over this issue. Heck, Sun has never been a litigious, two main cases being MIcrosoft (bastardizing Java) and NetApp (counter-suing them... in California vis-a-vis NetApp filing in lower Texas court).

However, there *definitely* would be issues raised by Sun over this issue. You can fork and modify their Java implementation all nilly-willy you want but you CANNOT call it Java unless it passes *all* the certification tests.

So unless Google certifies their implementation, it cannot be called Java, and if Google doesn't - there *would* definitely be issues. Sun doesn't take bastardization of Java lightly!

Slashdot is being sensational

[bogaboga]

The article that Slashdot links to is headed: "Google and Sun may butt heads over Android." Key word: "May".

Then Slashdot modifies the headline to say: "Google, Sun Headed for Showdown Over Android."

Question is: Does anyone of these reporters work for either company in order to have this seemingly serious situation? I doubt it.

Re:Does Sun make any money from Java on phones?

[mhall119]

Sun has or is in the process of open-sourcing their implementations of JavaSE [java.net], JavaME [java.net] and JavaEE [java.net], as well as their JVM [java.net] and Java compiler [java.net].

Sun does make money licensing their Java code to third parties, but that isn't a requirement for providing Java support. The Java language specification is freely available, anybody can create their own implementation, but for most companies it is cheaper to reuse Sun's implementation than make their own. Sun even provides financial assistance for small businesses or open-source projects to take the Java compatibility test. Heck, they've even open-sources the test harness for the compatibility test.

Re:Does Sun make any money from Java on phones?

[ricegf]

I don't know for sure, but since it's Slashdot, I'll happily speculate. ;-)

Java is GPLed. A manufacturer is free to tweak Java for his machine and ship it... with the source code. Or, he can pay Sun a nominal fee for a non-GPL license and tweak to his heart's content, and keep his tweaks to himself.

This is precisely the dual-license model used for QT, and it works pretty well. Free software gets to use the technology for free. Proprietary software pays for a proprietary license, but they're charging their customers anyway. Everybody's happy. Well, except for BSD advocates... ;-) ;-)

Re:To put it bluntly.

[fm6]

Pretty much. But it's worth noting that many companies in Sun's position would sue Google. Not only did Google clone Sun's Java technology, they hired some of Sun's best Java people to do it. Of course, suing wouldn't accomplish much, but some ego-driven CEOs wouldn't let that stop them.

Re:To put it bluntly.

[Dr. Slacker]

I think you forgot that MS had to stop using their Java VM and use Sun's VM instead. If you look in an XP machine's Control Panel you'll see Sun's JAVA icon.

Re:A bigger story - BSD libc + Linux

[DavidNWelton]

No, it was aimed squarely at having a smaller libc than glibc, according to the google guy who was hanging out on #android. It is an "embedded device" with space constraints, you know!

Re:To put it bluntly.

[Pollardito]

Now given the way that Sun sued Microsoft over changing parts of Java in the past, it's almost guaranteed that they'll do it again over Google not using their virtual machine or library.

but did they just take away things from the library and not add new features to the core? it's one thing to release a new platform that doesn't support all of the java libraries, that just means that existing programs aren't completely portable to your new device and is really your own loss. it's another to do what MS did and that is to add language features (method pointers for callbacks), release a developer suite for your bastardized version of the language, and encourage people to develop programs using it that won't work on other VMs. Sun probably doesn't love either choice, but they're not equivalent problems.